EXCLUSIVE: COVID Response Aimed to Impose Control on Population: Physician, Refugee From Communist Country

Seeing the pandemic through the eyes of communism

Dr. Kat Lindley, a board-certified family physician based in Texas and member of the World Council for Health Steering Committee, in Avon, Conn. on Feb. 17, 2023. Tal Atzmon/The Epoch Times

A physician who fled communist Yugoslavia saw the COVID-19 pandemic “through two eyes.” On the one hand, she perceived it from a doctor’s perspective; on the other hand, she looked at it through the eyes of someone who grew up under communism.

Dr. Kat Lindley, a family physician and president of the Texas branch of the American Academy of Physicians and Surgeons, grew up in former communist Yugoslavia and lived there until she was 18 years old.

During the economic and political turmoil that spread through the country in the 1980s, her family, worrying about Lindley’s future, arranged a job for her in Italy, she recalled.

“I actually left one day before the [civil] war started in Yugoslavia,” Lindley said in a recent interview on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Lindley was working part-time at an urgent care facility while transitioning her private practice to a new facility.

At the beginning of the pandemic, doctors at the facility were seeing all patients, including those who potentially had COVID-19, Lindley said.

One day, Lindley saw a patient complaining of congestion, whose oxygen level was unusually low, so she sent the patient to the hospital, where the person died a few days later.

After that incident, the urgent care center told its personnel not to see COVID-19-suspected patients anymore. Lindley said. Anyone who came with COVID-19 symptoms was sent to the hospital to be triaged through the hospital.

“I’m considered ‘frontline,’” Lindley said. Frontline providers are supposed to diagnose the patent and treat them as best they can, she explained, despite the inherent risk. “We accept that risk,” she said.

Lindley said that the decision to send patients directly to the hospital did not make sense from a doctor’s standpoint. Then, she started seeing it through the lens of her experience under communism and began recognizing the fear emanating from media reports about how the virus spread in China and New York and how many people died of COVID-19.

Lockdowns

A person wearing a protective face mask as a precaution against COVID-19 walks by a closed storefront in Lebanon, Pa., on May 12, 2020. AP Photo/Matt Rourke

Next, stay-at-home orders and lockdowns were imposed. Everything was closed, including schools and churches; only essential workers could go out.

Lindley said she understood the 15-day “slow the spread” restrictions for a brief moment because of the disease outbreak in New York, but she had concerns when the restrictions were extended.

Specifically, the ban on buying seeds at stores like Walmart imposed by the Governor of Michigan concerned her. “What does this have to do with COVID?” she wondered.

In early April of 2020, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, expanded her “stay-at-home” executive order by directing large stores to close aisles and shelves “dedicated to carpeting, flooring, furniture, garden centers, plant nurseries, or paint,” according to a statement.

“That was when I completely knew that this had nothing to do with the illness. It had to do with our government taking control of our lives,” Lindley recalled.

“It was really weird how this virus just shut down the whole world.”

Negotiating Freedom

Then, the government started “negotiating” with people, Lindley said. “If you are six feet apart, you can stay in line, and you can go to the store.” Some stores designated early hours for the elderly, she recalled. “If you wear a mask, you can start doing more things.”

Eventually, when the COVID-19 vaccine was developed, those who got vaccinated were allowed to travel and could visit their loved ones.

“I recognized that as the tactics of totalitarianism,“ Lindley said.”The state makes you fear something really bad, and then they isolate you so you cannot discuss what’s going on. They start telling you: ‘If you do this, I’ll give you a little bit of that,’ until it gets to the point that you can’t do anything unless they give you permission.

“Institutions, our government’s leaders, everyone has really employed these global psyops [psychological operations], that vaccines are safe and effective,” Lindley said. “That narrative has been broken down so many times, but they’re still going with it.”

A recent study conducted by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University concluded that COVID-19 vaccine mandates implemented in nine cities across the United States did little to restrict the spread of infection and had a negative effect on unvaccinated individuals and businesses.

There were also concerns about the hazards of COVID-19 vaccines using mRNA technology. Some of those hazards were known by scientists prior to the release of the vaccines, and should have raised red flags about their use in humans, say experts like Dr. Colleen Huber in her book Neither Safe Nor Effective: The Evidence Against the COVID Vaccines.

Fear was used to induce compliance with the COVID-19 measures, Lindley asserted. When broadcasting news, television stations displayed a ticker tape on the bottom of the screen with the death toll from COVID-19. The number kept rising.

People were afraid, and some people, especially the elderly, still live in this fear, Lindley noted.

Mask Mandate

Masked parents direct their children on the first day of school at Enrique S. Camarena Elementary School in Chula Vista, Calif. on July 21, 2021. Denis Poroy/AP Photo

Mask mandates for children, teaching kids to stay at arm’s length from each other and warning them that they could kill their grandparents if they were close to them, served the purpose “to make those children compliant,” Lindley said.

“That all was done to make our children compliant at that young age, and they learned these things very easily.”

Communist countries used fear to make their own citizens compliant, Lindley said. “Our countries have done it to us with this pandemic.”

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky in Washington on Feb. 8, 2023. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Masks have been proven ineffective in preventing COVID-19 infection, but they are still being pushed on people, Lindley said, citing CDC Director Rochelle Walensky’s recent testimony to Congress.

In January, the Cochrane Library, whose health care research reviews are considered to be the gold standard by U.S. officials and others, published an update to its analysis of masking as a method to prevent COVID-19 and other respiratory illnesses. The review concluded that “wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference” to COVID-19 outcomes.

Nonetheless, Walensky defended mask mandates during a February congressional hearing on COVID-19 response, arguing that the Cochrane analysis had certain limitations that undermined its conclusions.

The CDC’s guidance on mandate masks in schools does “not change with time; what it changes with is disease,” Walensky said. “When there’s a lot of disease in a community, we recommend that those communities and those schools mask, when there’s less disease in the community, we recommend that those masks can come off.”

Codes for the Unvaccinated

Lindley believes that new medical diagnosis codes for COVID-19 immunization status that were implemented in the United States a year ago could be used to stigmatize unvaccinated people.

One code indicates “unvaccinated for COVID-19.” Another code indicates that patients are partially vaccinated, which means having received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine but not having received enough doses to meet the CDC’s definition of fully vaccinated.

“We’ve never labeled something that does not have the disease status. This is not the disease status; this is just [to indicate] that you’re not vaccinated,” Lindley said. “But interestingly, we don’t have a code for the vaccinated.”

The implications of implementing these codes are not known yet, but they can be used for tracking the unvaccinated, Lindley said.

In the event that a digital social credit system is introduced in the future, those codes can be incorporated into the system, Lindley speculated.

Treating COVID-19 Patients

Ivermectin tablets packaged for human use. Natasha Holt/The Epoch Times

Lindley was one of a few doctors using repurposed medications to treat COVID-19 patients early in the pandemic.

“The fact that we were told not to try anything but to send people to the hospital didn’t make sense. A lot of private practices just closed their doors, and until they figured out how to use the telemedicine component, they didn’t really even do much,” Lindley said.

“In my [private] practice, whoever came in, I just took care of them, treated them, and they did fine,” Lindley continued, adding that as an essential worker, she did not need to follow the “stay-at-home” order.

In addition to practicing osteopathic medicine in a small town in Texas, Lindley put herself on the FLCCC (Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance) list and AAPS (American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists) online provider lists. “Then, people started calling me from all over Texas.”

Of the dozens of COVID-19 patients that Lindley treated, none of them passed away. “I only had two [patients] that ended up in a hospital, but mainly because they didn’t start medication right away.”

During the pandemic, information about certain medications that are effective for COVID-19 started to come out, Lindley said. But even without such information, a physician can treat a patient with cough, inflammation, shortness of breath, and other COVID-19 symptoms, she pointed out.

“There are things we can try, even if you don’t know exactly what’s going to end up working.”

When the pandemic hit, physicians started exchanging information about treatments they had tried and their outcomes, Lindley said. Before the pandemic, she knew two doctors who later pioneered COVID-19 early treatment, Dr. Peter McCullough (an internist, cardiologist, and epidemiologist) and Dr. Ryan Cole (pathologist and founder of Cole Diagnostics), so it was easy for her to draw from their experience.

”It was almost learning as you go until we all figured out together how to come up with the different protocols. Then once you start treating, it wasn’t a big deal.”

Zachary Stieber and Naveen Athrappully contributed to this report.